Ink jet printing is a printing application with the potential for wide use in decorating the surfaces of food items. However, in order to be suitable for use on foods, ink formulations should be food grade formulations, should be compatible with the food surfaces onto which they will be applied, and should have properties (e.g., viscosities, surface tensions, smear resistance, solubilities, drying times) that make them suitable for use with ink jet printers. Few presently available inks meet all of these limitations. For example, many ink jet ink formulations include compounds that cause deleterious health effects when ingested by humans. Other ink formulations have high water contents, resulting in viscosities that are too low to permit the inks to be successfully jetted onto an edible surface. Still other ink jet ink formulations are incapable of being printed directly onto a food substrate without smearing or image bleed. One solution that has been used to deal with this latter problem is to print a decoration onto an edible paper, such as rice paper, and then to apply the decorated paper to a food item. Unfortunately, this process involves multiple processing steps and is not well suited for use with food items of all shapes and sizes. Thus, a need exists for a food grade coloring formulation that can be printed directly onto the surfaces of a variety of food items to produce a high quality image using ink jet printing technology.